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What do you do with the person you love most in the whole world? Take ‘em out and shoot ‘em. No, seriously. Take them outdoors and take photos until you have a portrait that expresses how much they mean to you. That’s the premise behind The Ones We Love, a collection of work by 100 young photographers from around the world. The portraits range from dark to sweet to funny, but they’re all amazing images. If you love somebody, shoot them. The Ones We Love p.s. Thanks to Jittery Joe’s Coffee for sponsoring our “Monday Stinks!” contest! |
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Pretend you’re eight years old for a second. Now pretend you just got a photo in the mail from your new buddy in Finland. Fantastic, right? Best mail ever! Now here’s the secret: it’s still that much fun to get photos from around the world. And it’s super easy thanks to Postcrossing: send a postcard to somebody, and somebody sends you a postcard back. Collect photos from 175 countries without blowing all your airline miles! You can even request pictures of specific things. Since you’re sending pictures anyway, why not use your own? Slip your prints into postcard mailers and put the whole shebang in the mail. Get out and document your favorite things about the place you live, or the people you see every day. They sure won’t have anything that cool on the postcard rack at the drugstore. If you missed being eight, you’ll be glad you became a postcrosser. Postcrossing.com (Thx, Adam!)
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Ever feel like your photos are getting lost on your hard drive or on Flickr? That the more photos you take, the harder it is to find the great ones, and the less special each becomes? So do we. So we’ve been working on something new called Photojojo Time Capsule, and we’re really excited to release it! Every couple weeks, Time Capsule digs up your photos on Flickr from a year ago, choosing the ones that are most interesting (most views, comments, and faves), then sends them to you in a quick email. We’ve been using it for a while, and it’s amazing how nostalgia-inducing it’s been to get a little time capsule every couple weeks. :) Give it a try and make your photos special again. (Just 7.5 seconds to set up!) Photojojo’s Photo Time Capsule
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Okay, so we didn’t get on the cover of Time Magazine last year. Or the year before that. We’ve come to terms with it, mostly because Mag My Pic puts our mug on whatever magazine cover we want. There’s a nice part of us that thinks our dads would really like being on Time or GQ for their birthday. But there’s another part of us that wants to use our newfound powers for evil. We’re gonna put our bratty little sister on the cover of Pet Fancy. We’re gonna dig up our brother’s “awkward phase” pictures and put them on Sports Illustrated. Wooo, take that suckas! That’s how we do irony! (Incidentally, do yourself a favor and browse some of the covers other people have done. There are days worth of entertainment in those archives.) p.s. Our friends at MonsterHoodies make hoodies that are so cute, they’re scary. Make your scariest monster face, and post a pic in the forum to win one for free! Details |
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Sure, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what happens if you miss the picture? You know the ones we mean — those once-in-a-lifetime photos that got away. Because you left your camera at home. Or, if you’re like us, you left the darn thing on manual and got a nice solid black jpeg for your troubles. When Michael David Murphy missed the perfect photo opp while in Ethiopia, he turned the moment into a vivid account of the photograph that wasn’t. Unphotographable was born. The site catalogues “exceptional mistakes” — photographs that didn’t happen but whose stories he must tell anyway. They’re the most real, perfect photographs you’ll never see. Unphotographable [via Kottke] p.s. Many thanks to squarespace for sponsoring the next few Photojojo newsletters. Squarespace takes the work out of building beautiful, ad-free portfolios for professional photographers. |
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You’ve decked the halls with miles of tiny bulbs. Your front lawn is a gleaming monument to electric lighting. Even the neighbors have taken to wearing sunglasses 24/7. It’s the Christmas wonderland of your dreams… now if only you could get a good picture of it. Photographing holiday lights is no easy task. Luckily, we’ve had the Photojojo elves round up the best tips and guides to taking successful Holiday photos. Call it our gift to you… now go make Clark W. Griswold proud. |
When we want to go exploring, we (of course) pull out the couch cushions and start setting up a pillow/cushion jungle in the living room. But when National Geographic goes exploring, they really go exploring – all around the world, to places we’ve never even dreamed of. And they take pictures. Awesome pictures. In fact, we can’t believe how well National Geographic’s award-winning photography lends itself to being used as desktop wallpaper on our computer – and luckily enough, National Geographic now offers many of their photos in wallpaper form. With breathtaking photos capturing topics as broad-reaching as an Old Havana playground and Pigeons in St. Peter’s Square, why, we might actually return the couch cushions back to their intended place-setting because we don’t need them anymore. We’re about as happy right now as David Livingstone in Zanzibar! National Geographic’s Desktop Wallpapers! [via getTRIO.com] |
Bah. Humbug! We don’t know why, but this time of year we really can’t resist playing the grouch. That’s why we love the wonderfully humbug-ish Scrooge Yourself – plop in some photos, and instantly turn yourself and your friends into crotchety old cumudgeons. (You can make ‘em dance, too, but we find that’s counter-intuitive to being a grouch.) All that festive yuletide? Bah! Out the window. As a scrooge, you never have to worry about being happy again. (But just in case you want to be mirthful – though we can’t imagine why – there’s Elf Yourself, the singing, dancing elfish equivalent of Scrooge Yourself. The new and improved Elf Yourself cranks the yuletide up a notch, too, by allowing you to call up a toll-free number and leave a voice message, to lend your voice to your digital elf friend. You can also upload multiple photos to put together a dancing elf troupe… but with all the joy and happiness it brings, we really wouldn’t recommend it.) Scrooge Yourself |
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Now you can create a puzzle with your own photo (without pushing around hard plastic chicklets with your fingernails) with Befuddlr. Upload your photo to the Photojojo Flickr group, go to Befuddlr and click “photojojo”, select your photo, and scramble it into an online puzzle game! The site will even time your unscrambling attempts, making for a perfect mid-day office-wide showdown. We did this one in 21.4 seconds. Can you beat us? Befuddlr: Make Online Photo Scramble Puzzles from Your Photos Photo by jessi p.s. Our pal Amy, one of the site’s founders, tells us they’ve got lots more on the way, including user accounts and a way to challenge your friends directly! |
Remember those plastic scramble puzzles you used to get in cereal boxes or from the toy vending machines at the grocery store?
Ever had Grandma Edna email you her latest vacation cruise photos, only to find the images so small and pixelated that she and Gramps look like they were made of LEGOs? VectorMagic has the answer. A free website from the folks down at Stanford, VectorMagic takes your raster images and turns them into smooth vector drawings. Unlike raster images, vector drawings are made of geometric shapes instead of pixels, so you can infinitely resize them with no fuzzy or blockiness! This makes them ideal for blowing up a small photo to, say, the size of your bedroom wall. Other programs that will do this, but VectorMagic is web-based and will run on most computers. Plus, its algorithms do an impressive job of translating photographs into realistic vectors — something others choke on. So dump those passé pixels… and give your tiny photos a new photographic life, smooth and vectorized! VectorMagic — Convert Photographs to Vector Images Automatically See also… The Rasterbator – Huge, Wall-sized Prints Using Your Inkjet or Laser BlockPosters – Turn Photos Into Posters With Block Posters p.s. Be one of the first to join our brand-new Photojojo fan club on Facebook! (We’re having decoder rings made up as we speak.) |
